Every month at my children’s school we host a special event for the entire school staff. This is our way, from the parent’s side to say thank you to them for putting up with our children!

This month we will be doing a south of the border themed event for ‘Cinco de Mayo’ which translated in spanish, means the 5 th of May. This day is celebrated in th U.S to commemorate Mexican pride and heritage. In schools across the U.S there will be educational, cultural and other fun activities highlighting Mexican culture on this day.

So I started testing recipes a few days ago to see what I wanted to serve for our staff of about 220 for an afternoon snack. One of the recipes I worked on was inspired by “Churros’ . These are lightly sweetened dough piped into long ribbed shapes in hot oil, fried golden brown and dusted with cinnamon sugar. These treats from Spain made their way to South America and are a very popular snack there.

Now if I could only skip the making of the dough and frying. Enter puff pastry sheets and baking! I got a batch of sample Churros from Costco and truth be told the baked “imitation” Churros were a pretty good matchup. With this humble puff pastry sheet you can turn out wonderful twisted cinnamon sticks in no time at all.

Thaw out the puff pastry sheet according to package directions. Gently roll out the creases [ shown in the earlier picture ] with a rolling pin. You can roll the sheet to make it thinner. Just be gentle when stretching it out.

Next score the pastry sheet in the middle to serve as a guide to help you fold. Then dip a pastry brush in some heavy cream and brush on all four edges of the sheet. This is to help seal the edges for later.

Take your cinnamon sugar and sprinkle all over the sheet, reserving about a teaspoon of the mixture for later. Gently press the sugar onto the sheet with your fingertips or you can press with a rolling pin.

Now using the scored line as a guide fold one half over the other and press the edges to seal.

Gently go over with a rolling pin to glue both sides together. I cut out 1/2 inch strips of the folded dough and started twising each strip.

Hey, why not some sugar love on the outside as well I thought to myself. So I brushed more heavy cream on the strips and sprinkled it with sugar. Now of course I was on a mission to dust every surface with cinnamon sugar. I carefully turned all the strips over to the other side, brushed and sprinkled them also. When twisting each strip make sure you pinch both ends so they don’t open up during baking.

Line a baking pan with parchment paper and lay all the strips with a little room to groove and bake in a preheated 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes.